Data silos grow within a company for many reasons, but a few of the usual suspects include best of breed technologies that don’t quite work together fully, enterprising employees who build homegrown systems for getting work done faster, decentralized decision-making intended to bring nimbleness and accountability to an organization, and department heads that feel they need specific software functionality and data access for their part of the business.

The problem is that the negative impact of data silos usually outstrips the benefit; businesses can’t fully use and work with data when it is locked up in several different systems, when employees in other departments don’t even know that some data stores exist.

Data is increasingly the foundation on which competitive businesses run, and that will only increase as artificial intelligence drives new insight and use cases for data. But data silos stand in the way, making the need to eliminate these data islands more important than ever.

Here are five keys for reducing or eliminating data silos within your company.

1. Work Off a Single IT Platform

The best way for an organization to eliminate data silos is by having a single IT infrastructure that houses and gives access to all of a company’s data. Data entry and manipulation can take place in other systems, but master data should be stored in a common underlying system so there is no fragmentation or data stores hidden away within a company.

“The first key is to have a data platform foundation that helps with agility to ingest diverse data,” notes Raghu Chakravarthi, senior vice president of research and development and support services for data management firm Actian.

2. Offer APIs and Diverse Connectivity Options

Because each department and business unit likely will have different needs, the second key for eliminating data silos is allowing a range of ways for connecting with corporate data in the master system.

“The days of importing all data into a data warehouse with a single toolset are fading away,” says Tolga Tarhan, chief technology officer for cloud consulting firm Onica. “By using your data lake as the common meeting ground, producers and consumers have a simple and effective handoff but don't need to share tools or technology stacks.”

Make sure that your underlying system of record supports numerous ways for other systems to connect with the data, including APIs and easy integration hooks for popular platforms and cloud services. This way the common data core can serve a wide range of interfaces and data needs — and discourage employees from storing data elsewhere.

3. Create Metadata Catalogues

Cutting down on silos is about freeing data so it is known and accessible by those who need it. If all data cannot exist in a single system — or even if it can — cataloguing can help make siloed data accessible to employees beyond those who created it.

This cataloguing of data can be automated with rules-based data ingesting or with the help of artificial intelligence, and there’s even a movement toward crowd-sourcing the cataloguing effort.

“Embrace data cataloguing,” stresses Meley at Teradata. “There’s a positive movement going on over the last year around crowdsourcing metadata, also known as data catalogs. Data catalogs help enterprises inventory distributed data assets by empowering willing and able analysts.”

4. Include Robust Access Rights

One reason that corporate data gets locked in silos is because there are security concerns. Not all data should be accessible to all employees, especially when it comes to HR, financial or sensitive customer information. As a result, firms often silo this data as a blunt force security measure.

Another key for eliminating data silos is putting in place comprehensive access controls that define and control access to each type of data in the system. This both enables the creation of a single source of truth, and it encourages employees to relinquish control of their data since they still can serve as the steward or gatekeeper of their data.

“Applying proper data classifications and access control to your vast data lake is critical,” says Tarhan at Onica. “Also, ensure that all access is logged and auditable.”

5. Start With the Silos that Hurt the Most

Not every business is ready for a single source of truth, of course. Unifying an organization’s data requires buy-in at the top, and also from all key stakeholders within the business.

If working from a single IT platform is not possible, whether because of a technical issue or a lack of buy-in at the top, businesses still can tackle silos one at a time.

A good place to start is identifying the silos that most directly impact the bottom line of the company. Rather than boiling the ocean, it often is more effective to identify where data fragmentation is stopping key decision-making and then use that as the basis for driving data unification. The political will for tackling data silos is much stronger if the return on investment is clear.

Data is valuable. Silos directly lessen that value. Don’t tolerate data silos, eliminate them by implementing a common IT foundation and addressing the root causes that are encouraging these silos.